Tech Salaries by Industry 2026

These are wide ranges for a reason: the right number depends on your funding stage, how the business is doing and how urgently you’re hiring. We place strong people across the whole band, not just at the top.

The same role does not cost the same everywhere

A senior backend engineer is not one price. In 2026 the industry you hire in moves the number as much as the city does, and misjudging that is how companies end up either overpaying against their own market, or running three-month searches for candidates whose real price they never matched.

The table above summarises the premiums we see across public 2026 benchmarks, Ravio’s compensation trends, levels.fyi, Wellfound’s hiring data, Glassdoor and the Robert Half salary guide, sense-checked against the searches we actually run. The baseline is a general venture-backed startup or scale-up; the London, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York guides give absolute figures per city.

Fintech & payments: the deepest pockets, the highest bar

Fintech pays 10–20% above the general market for equivalent seniority. In New York, fintech startup pay runs about 13% above the citywide startup average, and senior engineering offers commonly carry 20–40% bonuses on top. The premium concentrates on people who have run money in production: payments, ledgers, trading systems and regulated environments. A senior backend engineer who’d price at £85k–£120k in general SaaS prices around £90k–£125k in London fintech. Full benchmarks on our fintech recruitment page.

AI & machine learning: the fastest-moving premium

AI and ML engineers earn roughly 8–15% above general software engineers in London and 15–25% in Berlin, and the gap is widening at the specialist end: engineers who combine LLM experience with MLOps consistently earn £10k–£25k above peers at the same level. US AI labs have detached from the market entirely: six-figure signing bonuses on senior offers. That matters even in Europe, because that’s who you’re bidding against for the top decile. Details on our AI & data page.

SaaS & B2B: the baseline everyone else is priced against

B2B software is the reference market, in London that means senior engineers at £85k–£120k base and 10–20% bonuses at growth stage. The levers that move pay inside SaaS are stage and specialism rather than the vertical itself: platform, security and infrastructure skills price above product engineering, and Series C+ companies pay 25–30% more than early-stage for the same title, the single biggest premium in this dataset, bigger than any industry effect. More on our SaaS recruitment page.

Marketplaces & consumer: two markets in one

Early-stage consumer companies pay at or slightly below the startup baseline, but the established marketplace tier (the Just Eat, Booking, Uber class) pays firmly above it, €100k–€150k+ for senior engineers in European hubs. The premium skill is high-scale platform and experimentation engineering, which prices at fintech-adjacent levels wherever it goes. See our marketplaces & consumer page.

How to use this when you’re hiring

Benchmark against your vertical, not “the market”. A general-market salary survey will underprice a fintech or AI search by 10–25% before you’ve started.
Stage beats industry. If you’re early-stage, competing on base against Series C+ is a losing game. Compete on equity, scope and speed instead.
The premium buys speed. Pricing at your vertical’s real market rate is usually cheaper than the three extra months of an underpriced search.
For specialist and leadership mandates we regularly place above every range on this page. The tables are the market’s centre of gravity, not its ceiling.

If you want a specific role benchmarked against live data for your industry and city, talk to us. It takes us days, not weeks.